Once, while researching the development of Israel’s economy, I came across an incredible statistic. Between the late 1980s and 1996, during which somewhere around 800,000 Soviet and Russian Jews came to Israel, the Jewish state’s unemployment rate actually dropped. That is, Israel absorbed an immigration explosion that increased its population by about 15 percent so smoothly that unemployment actually went down.
How? Well, broad economic trends tend to be driven by multiple factors, but one of them surely was that Israel benefited greatly from Russia’s Jewish brain drain. (It turns out the real “Jewish Problem” is not having enough Jews.)
It is the intangible part of population shifts, as Americans—also citizens of a country blessed by immigration waves—well know.
This is what came to mind when I read the story in the Montreal Gazette about one of Canada’s leading doctors leaving the country for the U.S., largely over anti-Semitism, and decamping to Atlanta. Dr. Emmanuel Moss is the chief of cardiac surgery at the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal. He is also, according to the website of McGill University, where Moss directs the cardiac surgery residency training program, “one of the only surgeons in Canada routinely performing both robotic mitral valve and coronary bypass surgeries.” The president of Quebec’s association of cardiothoracic surgeons said that Moss is “ultra-specialized in robotic surgery” and “in the prime of his career.”
Canada’s loss, our gain.
There’s more to the significance of this than one man’s life-saving talent, of course. And to be fair, anti-Semitism isn’t the only reason Moss was reportedly unhappy. He has been warning of the hospital system’s staffing and equipment shortfalls. But, as noted in the piece, those aren’t new problems. Anti-Semitism, as one source put it, has reached a tipping point: “The problems with the health system have existed for years, and [Moss] could have left at any time before. So what it comes down to is the antisemitism and the feeling that this (city) has become an increasingly dangerous or unrecognizable place to live.”
We can zoom out several ways here. First, I’ve written here at length about Canada’s anti-Semitism problem and the lack of initiative being taken to stop it. So it isn’t all that surprising that a certain number of Jews would leave as long as the status quo remained or worsened. What’s worth adding here is that this is Canada, our neighbor to the north, and not some far-flung post-Soviet province.
Of course, there isn’t an ongoing exodus of Jews from Canada—the point is to recognize trends before they become irreversible.
Next we can zoom out to the medical industry. Anti-Semitism in medicine is entering a crisis point. In December, over a thousand Jewish medical practitioners signed an open letter decrying “two years of near-constant abuse and a far longer erosion of professional norms” they have faced over anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism in the industry. As Jewish Insider noted, this was only “the latest of several similar attempts by Jewish doctors, therapists and nurses to garner attention about the exclusion and harassment that many say they have faced in their fields since the Oct. 7 terror attacks.”
This particular letter was about the United States, lest anyone think that what has haunted Europe and Canada does not also make its way here.
To zoom out even further, there’s the post-tragedy tragedy of a society’s realization of what a post-Jewish-exodus locale looks like.
In 2015, someone found a remarkable item at a flea market in Paris: a nitrate print of a 1924 silent Austrian film, The City Without Jews. The famous film, a screen adaptation of Hugo Bettauer’s book of the same name, was thought to be lost forever. Bettauer was an Austrian writer whose story is one of haunting prophecy. He foresaw the rise of Nazism and the bleak future for Europe’s Jews, and wrote a satirical novel about his beloved Vienna. In the book, anti-Jewish agitation leads to the deportation of the entire city’s Jewish population. But soon, the residents regret the economic calamity they have brought on themselves by de-Judaizing their city, and demand starts to grow to bring all the Jews back.
Bettauer was a fairly well-known writer, but it was the film adaptation of his book that really caused a stir. “His private address was published and in the newspapers, it was explicitly said that such a person shouldn’t be part of society,” the head of collections at Filmarchiv Austria told the BBC when the film was restored.
Bettauer was murdered by Nazi supporters a year later. The chilling scenes of mass deportation of Jews would eventually be Europe’s reality.
What anti-Semites so hated about Bettauer’s book and the movie was, of course, the idea that Jews add so much to society that their absence can be catastrophic economically and culturally. There is no reason any modern country should have to learn this lesson for itself.
Source:
www.commentary.org
